Batgirl is pretty much gone. New Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav axed the film from ever being released, and he does not seem the type of person who’s going to go back on decisions based on fake accounts yelling on Twitter. That means it’s just behind-the-scenes stuff for us. Thankfully the cast and crew of the film don’t seem too shy about sharing a bit of that content, the latest being a behind-the-scenes action stunt sequence that was posted by one of the Batgirl stars, Ivory Aquino.
Just.. WOWWW🙌 @EmelyTKD @lesliegrace you make a great tandem fo sure💛 #batgirl #sistershavingeachothersbacks #sistershavingeachothersbackflips pic.twitter.com/uAAFWWN2fm
— Ivory Aquino (@MsIvoryAquino) September 18, 2022
Aquino tagged both Batgirl herself, Leslie Grace, and her stunt double Emely Cartagena in the post, but judging from the action, Cartagena is probably the one we’re seeing in the video. In it she falls from the ceiling of a building, does a flip, grabs onto a Christmas tree, and then tumbles to the ground. It’s actually a pretty cool stunt, and thanks to the second half of the video we get to see what it may have looked like in the film. She definitely stuck the landing with a cool superhero landing pose. It’s obviously unknown what part of the movie this behind-the-scenes footage is from, but the Batgirl stunt just goes to show, yet again, that the movie had a ton of work put into it and was so close to being done before it got completely canned.
Reports conflict but Batgirl seems to have been canceled because it was deemed less profitable to release on HBO Max than to simply take a tax write-off for, and the movie didn’t have Zaslav’s standard of quality — owing to the film’s budget — to release theatrically either. Zaslav himself came out recently defending the decision as just one of those things that happen in Hollywood and criticized the media for blowing it out of proportion. This is despite the reaction of creatives across the industry being loud and negative. Of course, what he failed to mention was that this was not just the cancellation of a DC superhero film, but one of the few superhero films with a female and also Latina lead. Maybe the film wasn’t as shiny as could be, but the move was a big deal no matter what.
On a totally unrelated side note, Zaslav hasn’t canceled The Flash despite the rampant and disturbing behavior of its lead star, Ezra Miller. Evidently, the standards of that movie are really high.
